In the context of democratic politics, conservative parties are confronted with what Daniel Ziblatt (2017) labels the “Conservative dilemma”. They face a tradeoff in winning mass elections with appeals to their traditionally narrow base. The debate on the reform of secondary education that emerged in advanced democracies in the post-WW II period constituted such a dilemma. In order to defend the societal order and traditional elites (Lawton, 1994; Berthezène, 2004), throughout the 19^th century, Conservative parties had fought for limiting access to higher education, a differentiated and localised provision, as well as devolving power to religious and private providers (Ansell & Linvdall, 2020; de Swaan, 1988). While such policies continued to profit the upper classes and politicised religious voters in the post-war era, the economic boom as well as ideas about educational equality rendered them increasingly unpopular among the broader electorate. In the first post-war period, all advanced democraties experienced increasing demands for expanding the state’s role in the provision of high-quality secondary education, while proposals aimed at eliminating or diminishing the role of differentiation, selection, and streaming in secondary schooling became increasingly popular. 

We find that, in navigating this dilemma, conservative and other centre-right parties followed diverging paths. For instance, right-wing parties in Austria, Germany, or the Netherlands continued to defend early streaming, while their counterparts in France, Italy, and later in newly democratized Greece, as well as the Anglo-right (except in Britain), supported de-streaming parts of secondary education to avoid overt institutional differences, while allowing other mechanisms of differentiation (e.g., the possibility for parents to opt out of the public system) – we call this option unstandardized de-stratification.

This paper asks for the reasons behind these varying paths. It therefore investigates the role of Conservative parties in promoting or managing structural reforms of secondary schooling in the first post-war period (1945-80). We argue that understanding this actor’s choices requires theorising both electoral logics and the power dynamics and actor coalitions that are specific to education systems. 

More specifically, while all conservative parties wanted to appeal to middle class voters, how they positioned themselves towards streaming depended on their relationship to two types of educational stakeholders, namely religious school providers and teachers organsations. The institutionalisation of primary and lower secondary education in the 19th century and early 20th century entrenched different systems of religious, teacher, and local control over education. Where center right parties had strong links to productive “losers” of comprehensive reforms, as they did with the upper secondary teachers in parts of continental Europe, they tended to resist de-stratification. By contrast, where these groups stood to gain pupils through de-streaming or they were not linked to center-right parties, the center-right pursued unstandardized de-stratification.

To develop the argument theoretically, the paper combines insights from two sets of literature. First, we rely on political science studies on electoral incentives and the partisan politics of education (e.g., Ansell, 2010; Busemeyer, Franzmann, & Garritzmann, 2013) to outline the incentives and challenges parties face in developing educational programmes in the context of democratic politics. Second, we draw on educational literature on the cultural and power relations that are specific to education policy and practice, in order to refine our understanding of the relationship between parties and other educational stakeholders in varying contexts (e.g., Ball, 1990, 2008; Gunter, 2015). Empirically, the paper relies on two complementary methodological approaches. First, we use a comparative approach to systematise the attitudes and roles of conservative parties in post-war educational reforms of secondary schooling and to relate these attitudes and roles to parties’ relationship with the aforementioned educational stakeholders. For this part of the analysis, we build on original source material (legislation and official policy documents) to document and systematise the development of education systems in 21 post-war advanced economies, including all larger democracies in Western Europe. We further rely on quantitative and qualitative content analysis (Prior, 2014) to code political manifestoes and official party literature produced by right-wing parties in these countries from 1945 to 1980, focussing on their stance on educational structures. Additional source material and case-specific literature are used to determine the relationship between the parties, religious educational providers, and teachers’ organisations in each case. The second part of the paper aims to refine our understanding of the role of right-wing parties in the identified reforms by delving more deeply into selected post-war reforms. We use deductive process tracking (Bennett & Checkel, 2015) on historical literature and source material to analyse the processes behind three cases of lower secondary reform by historically dominant centre-right parties: Bavaria, France and New South Wales. These case studies evidence how the parties’ different strategies followed also from the nature of their relationship with other educational stakeholders, with strong links between the CSU and gymnasium teachers in Bavaria, much weaker and more antagonistic relations between the Gaullist parties and teachers in France, and an alliance of Catholics with the political left in New South Wales that made comprehensive reforms more attractive for the right.

As several authors have recently argued, the study of education policy and politics have tendentially shown a greater interest for progressive and liberal actors, rather than their conservative counterparts (Geiss & Reh 2020; Giudici 2020; Nickerson 2012; Niesz et al. 2018). Despite the key role of conservative parties in post-war educational reforms, therefore, we still know little about how these parties engaged with such reforms – especially from comparative and European perspectives. Several studies have investigated the educational preferences and politics of individual – mainly Anglo-Saxon – Conservative parties and governments (e.g., Apple 2006; Ball 2008; Jones 2009; Lawton 1994; Nickerson 2012). However, analysis connecting or comparing this actor’s educational views and engagement across time and places are currently lacking, as are attempts to theorise their determinants. Empirically, therefore, this paper offers a first systematic analysis of how conservative parties approached secondary education in early post-war advanced democracies. Theoretically, by bridging the divide between political and educational literatures, it promises to refine our understanding of how political and educational logics interact in shaping parties’ educational agenda.

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